Former Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has warned the West, including the UK, has been “asleep at the wheel” over China and has laid bare what he thinks is keeping Chinese President Xi Jinping from invading Taiwan.
Speaking at London Defence Conference 2025 during a panel discussion on facing China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea (CRICK), Morrison, who served as the 30th Prime Minister of Australia from 2018 to 2022, opened up on a number of issues facing western nations.
On the threat posed by China, the 56-year-old warned: “Democracies and the West have been asleep at the wheel.”
He added: “There’ve been asleep at the wheel, though on the basis of an assumption which proved to be horribly wrong.
Scott Morrison warned the West has ‘been asleep at the wheel’ over China
GB News
“That being that you could engage with China and that they would somehow, through their economic development, all of a sudden become liberal democracies, which was never going to happen.
“They never intended to do that. And if you look closely at what their leaders were saying over that entire time, they understood that and we didn’t, and we got it wrong.
“And as a result, we now need a more intentional approach because we saw China push all the way through the South China Sea, turn coral atolls into now stationary aircraft carriers, and basically just kept going until someone said, ‘stop’.
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS:
Scott Morrison was joined on the panel by
GB News
“Now, they are intentional and clear-eyed about what their purpose is, and we must be the same.
“And you ask the question, ‘Well, why? What is the deterrent?’ The deterrent is that every day, Xi Jinping wakes up and says ‘not today’ on Taiwan.
“If that happens, that changes the rest of the world, and the deterrents that you need, not just economic, but I’d be happy to start with the economic, but it has to work in total combination with a substantial military deterrent, which makes sure that China does not make that choice.
“Now you apply the same thing whether it’s to Iran or with Russia, who are obviously taking steps well above that line because of the failure of deterrents.”
Morrison warned attention was moving away from Europe and towards the Indo-Pacific
GETTY
Continuing to outline the threats currently faced by the West and how priorities have shifted from Europe to the east, the former Liberal Party leader said: “The United States in particular is facing a number of existential threats and where those threats present has shifted in the last 15 years.
“The Indo-Pacific is now the centre of the universe, not Europe, and Europe has very significant issues to deal with, but also a significant capacity to deal with them.”
He stressed it was important for Western nations to engage with allies and partners on both military and economic objectives to keep China at bay.
Morrison said: “It’s important that just as it was in Europe, which required allies and partners to work with the United States to resist this arc, so it will be in the Indo-Pacific.
“And so to reinforce the point that you need to engage allies and partners, not just on the military objectives, but on the economic objectives as well.”
Morrison also touched on the new Trump administration, claiming the 47th President of the US “doesn’t want to start a war, deal in a war, or send anyone to a war”.
“I applaud that, and he’s used economic levers to be effective in actually resisting CRICK, or whatever you want to define it as, is really important.
“But to do that, you’ve got to do it with other allies and partners.
“‘Why has the West always been so successful?’ because our alliances and coalitions have been doing it for a century.
“We’ve been fighting together for a century, and if we can apply that same alliance and partners mentality to restoring the US industrial base – which I think is the biggest challenge the US faces in terms of meeting its military objectives.
“And allies and partners can assist that venture, as much as it can, the security measure.”
